I make a program that handles the webcam.One of the services of this program is detection of motion.Each time program detects motion, capture the image, and send it using an email.

All works fine.

My hosting provider tells me about the max of emails i can send:3 emails/min using SMTP.15 emails/min using PHP.

I googled "SMTP send mail limit", and i get a lot of answers.Usually, free mail providers ( Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) limits the amount of send mails to 500 emails/day.

Now, the problem:

As this program is a gift (for free), I can't determine how many users could be using this program at the same time.If this users ( 1000, 10.000, 100.000, who knows... ) are using the detection of motion service, there are a very big amount of emails going to the SMTP Server at the same time.

How to bypass this problem ?

I think on this alternatives:

a) Force to use the user's email account: releases the overcharge of my smtp server, but i don't know if the user has an email account with smtp server. Problem is if user send very much emails to his smtp server, his account could be blocked.

b) Similar to a) plus delaying the amount of emails of each user: i tryed with a Delay "5000" in order to send an email every 5 seconds. I think if the delay is bigger, some important data ( intrudes, non autorized people, etc ) data will be losed. The result is not really good.

c) Similar to b), but sending emails using php. Hosting provider will feel a bit nervious....

This option (d) needs a client program that imports data from my database and store them into a local database.When user starts the client program, the ip is setted into the Users Table.Main program check each time motion is detected if the ip is > blank. If ip is setted, sends the data to the client local database directly, else, stores the new image (and datetime) on the Emails Table.

Each captured image (320 x 240) is near 10KB. After mime encoding, near 14 KBMy hosting has 2GB space, i think i can put into the database near 140.000 records (images)Then, if there are 10.000 users, each user can store 14 images into database... not enough good...

e) Install a SMTP server on each machine of each user. Not the best option... but the most efficient.

Hi DavidI made up a system where all our Depots and managers can go on the internet and viewthe cameras via my server. If you email me I will show you what I did and give you a link to myCameras I don't want to show link here as I don't want hundreds of people on my server

I used a shareware program which I installed on Depots computer andthen do a ftp to my server I only ftp every 10 seconds to save bandwidth as I have fourDepots each using 3 Cameras, this shareware program can do Motion Detection and youcan set it to email etc. I use cheap web cams and fit them into pvc. pipes to shelter from the rainIt works great and been doing this for over a year nowAll my cameras work off usb ports and can get 10 metres using special usb cablesMy email is kennethd@mweb.co.za

If you send one (14 KB) image every 5 seconds, it works out to 17,280 emails per day !!! ... and requires 242 MB of space for the images !!!

I do not believe that there is a human being capable of viewing so many images (and acting on them).

Perhaps you might consider ...

1) capturing such images on the computer attached to the web cam

2) when motion is suspected ...

a) start uploading (ftp) copies of images to your server

b) send a single email with a link that would allow the recipient to view the uploaded images (perhaps several pre-built links for a variety of time ranges around the suspicious moment in time).

... you could have some pre-arranged agreement with the user about how many "minutes of images should be uploaded" after motion is detected ... as well as "how long the uploaded files would be retained for online viewing" ... of course, before erasure, user could be sent a single email with a single attachment (a zip file containing the images about to be deleted)

Plus that other mates said, in my honest opinion is not a bad thing to ask the user for a valid SMTP server to use. I think in fact all the email accounts offer an SMTP server, so you can try to use the account provided by the user. If I use such kind of program and the program ask me for a valid email account I thinking comprensible and not a rare thing.

When you are done, perhaps you can share your experience with the community ... in particular, whether it can be deployed from within NeoBook using just the InternetGet/InternetPost commands ... not possible if it requires PUT/DELETE methods ... or expects values to be passed in the "Header of the Request".

If not, could it be invoked from the Browser Object ?

Would enhance the capabilities of Applications built with NeoBook if this service could be deployed from within the Applications ... perhaps the plugin gurus can also look into this.

Hi David, Can you please please help as not getting anywhere. I created a new accounf at mailgun.org but cannot get Neobook's "SendMail" to work with it. Am I missing something!! The details I am using are: Do I need to create a domain or something; all I have done is created an account.